Event details

OpenOffice reloaded

von Juergen Schmidt (IBM Deutschland Research & develompent GmbH)

Friday, 25.05.2012, Berlin I, 10:00-10:45 Uhr

OpenOffice is the leading open source office productivity suite supporting open standards (e.g. ODF) and is one of the biggest and most successful open source projects ever. 2011 was a challenging year for the OpenOffice project because the main sponsor Oracle announced to stop their investment in the project and they granted the source code and the trademarks to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). And parts of the community had already left the project at the end of 2010 and forked the derivative product LibreOffice. But OpenOffice was never dead and simply reorganized under the new hood of the ASF. The ASF and the so called "Apache way" is a well known and accepted model for driving open source projects and many very successful project are hosted there (e.g. Apache HTTP server, Apache tomcat, etc.).

This presentation is intended to give an overview of the current status and what the users of OpenOffice can expect in the future. The project is now driven by the project members which are all equal. No dominating corporate sponsor anymore and the members of the community are the blood of the project. IBM has announced as one of the first companies to stop their own fork Symphony and join the now more open project under the ASF. The many bugfixes and features developed for Symphony will be contributed to the Apache project and future development will take place at Apache and in the public. Many more companies have signaled interest and the Apache model has proven that it is business friendly.

Apache OpenOffice will continue to deliver an enterprise ready office productivity suite, better and user friendlier than before. The project will continue to support and promote the usage of ODF and will continue to be a reference implementation for ODF.

Über den Autor Juergen Schmidt:

Juergen Schmidt is working for IBM in the Collaboration Solutions department and his main focus is the OpenOffice project. He worked in the project since 1997 when he started to work for StarDivison and later for Sun and Oracle. Before the project moves in 2011 under the umbrella of the Apache Software Foundation he was a member of the OpenOffice.org Community Council and the project lead of the API and Extensions project. One aspect of his daily work is community building and helping to drive the project forward. His passion is to spread the knowledge around the programmability features of OpenOffice.org around the world and to show that it is more than only an office productivity suite. Juergen Schmidt is frequently speaking about OpenOffice on various national and international conferences.